Sticky Fingers
Apr. 21st, 2006 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotnik2004So how jealous am I of all you guys who have played or are playing in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
editswlonghair’s Caper game? Here’s a post (a bit long and kinda unedited) I started writing for the 20’ by 20’ Room (actually the first half of the post—it grew, like they always do) when head58 began talking up heist games a few weeks ago. (What happened to the “Bothans’ Eleven” idea, by the way?) I wanted to write this out before I actually sat down to reading John’s game, because it sounds like Caper works well enough to make much of my long-winded speculation on How A Heist Game Could Be Done kinda moot.
(John, let me know if it’s cool to post what follows, specifically the 3rd paragraph where I mention you and your game, on 20x20. If you want, I’ll take out the mention of Caper. Or I could just take out your name and the name of the game and say “a friend of mine.” My thinking is, it doesn’t hurt to mention your game, spread a little buzz, even if it’s not ready yet. I won’t include a link. But if you don’t want anything mentioned to the Teeming Dozens, that’s fine of course.)
For some time now, the devious little minds in my Boston gaming circle have been puzzling over the problem of the heist or caper game. The goal is to create an RPG that plays something like The Italian Job, Ocean’s Eleven, or David Mamet’s Heist. Or maybe more like a con movie—The Sting, The Hustler, The Grifters, and so on. It’s an attractive conundrum. Attractive, because these movies are a lot of fun. A conundrum, because the twists and surprises of a classic caper flick don’t translate easily to a traditional RPG. In a typical RPG, each player runs one character and expects to know more or less what that character knows at any given time. In the con or heist genre, the protagonists know what is going on, but the audience is kept one step behind. The fun comes in revealing to the audience things the protagonists knew all along: The Feds are in on the sting. Mr. Orange is a cop. The gasoline was in the bus. How do you make that work in a game where the audience and the protagonists are the same people?
Caper flicks have been around forever, but they may be having a “moment” right now, especially on the small screen with all these shows like Heist, Hustle, Thief, Finagle, Filcher, Yoink... My buddy John O’Brien has written the beta version of a game called Caper, a GM-less shared-narration kind of thing that by all early accounts nails the conundrum and takes its lunch money. I’ve got a copy of Caper on my hard drive but I haven’t read it yet. I was already working on this post (like I said, the heist genre is having a moment) when John sent me the PDF. And so I wanted to record my own unfinished ideas on the subject before I read how he went about slicing this Gordian knot.
What follows are five [two for now] rough ideas as to how you could run a heist game. I've ordered them from most traditional gaming style to most indie avant-garde. For each one, I’ve also tossed in a sketchily defined setting or situation, because who loves ya, baby?
Nilva the Filcher in Ill Met in Whitestork
If you want to be really old school about it, there already is an RPG that’s all about assembling a crack team of specialists, infiltrating a heavily guarded location with implausibly baroque security systems, and getting away with fabulous loot. (No, not Shadowrun.)
Dungeons & Dragons wasn't built to pull off the kind of turn-on-a-dime reversals and surprises you expect from a classic caper flick, but if what you really want is to fetishize the tools of the filcher, to obsess over all the keen things you can do with lock-picks and climbing claws, and all the keen things your opposition can do with poison darts and scything blades (or laser beams and motion sensors) why not use the old warhorse? Some of the best gaming I ever had revolved around those three magic words: find / remove traps.
A truly excellent heist game using D&D would actually demand a lot from both GM and players, particularly in the way of prep. The GM would be obliged to design every dungeon (or bank, palace, temple, harem?) in advance, and I mean really design the hell out of it. Their job would be to stay within the appropriate Challenge Ratings but to stock the map with every diabolical trick and trap they can come up with within those limits. The players would be empowered, or actually required, to min/max their characters for stealth and filchery, and to use every cunning feat and ability and magic item they could carry to beat the map and pull off the heist. Any kind of “no myth” “we’ll just make up the layout of the Sultan’s palace as we go along” thinking (which in most games, I'm totally down with) would deflate what’s meant to be a high tension battle of wits into mushy GM fiat.
My sample setting? I’m not really proposing an all-filcher spin-off to Dungeon Majesty. If the reference to the Sultan’s palace didn’t give it away, the D&D heist game I’d like to play would be The Forty Thieves. As in Ali Baba, The Thief of Baghdad, Arabian Nights. Mythic Baghdad, dream city of scheming viziers and gregarious rogues, sultry concubines and bhang-eating assassins, whirling dervishes and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Here’s how it goes: The players roll up forty thieves. Yes, forty. (You need something to keep the players busy while the GM is sweating over all those maps.) Each session (they’ll all have names like The Adventure of the Pious Monkey, The Adventure of the Stolen Melody and the Enchanted Bird, The Adventure of the Maiden Transformed into a Gazelle) the thieves embark on a daring caper, and each player will pick one of the band of forty as their PC for that session. Each thief has a different niche. Each one is optimized in a different way. The band of merry thieves also shares a stash of single-use or tightly-focused magical items—flying carpets, wonderful lamps, petulant djinn—but can only take a few baubles along on each adventure. So the game is all about ingenuity and resource management. (As a twist, you could set this game in GURPS Alternate Earth 2’s Caliph, a sci-fi Arabian Nights future where the djinn are sentient supercomputers, weird aliens make holy pilgrimage to Mecca from across the galaxy, and everybody’s carpet flies among mile-high diamond minarets. Groovy stuff.)
Immersion, Surprises, Strict Continuity: Pick Any Two
That subject heading is only partly in jest. A big problem with kitbashing the caper formula into a traditional RPG is all the planning required. Heists are exciting to watch. The meticulous planning that we presume precedes them, not so much. In most heist or caper movies, the audience doesn’t see the planning stage. We only see the execution, and are therefore surprised and delighted by the ingenuity of the caperers—all the little tools and gimcracks in their utility belts, everything they’ve planned and accounted for. And then the inevitable Murphy moment comes when they confront something they haven’t accounted for, and that’s even more fun.
Figuring out how to create that dynamic in an RPG, where the audience and the caperers are the same people, is the lure and the challenge of the heist game. Some newer games with scene framing and narration rights and the hey hey hey and the woo woo woo offer exciting ways to do that, and I’ll get to some ideas along those lines in the second half of this post, but right here I’m still trying to think of ways you could pull off a cool caper story using a relatively traditional ruleset.
Sorcerer has, as you might expect, a very simple and powerful system for dealing with sorcery. You never need to worry about “does the PC know spell X or spell Y” or “do I have the ingredients I need to perform this ritual”—the game folds all of those considerations into the sorcery roll itself. If you want to do a magical ritual, you roll the dice. If you succeed, then it means you knew how to do it, and you did it. You can narrate things however you like, and there are ways to complicate what’s going on, but the assumption is that the successful roll includes whatever skills, learning, and preparation was required. What this does is break, in a small but significant way, the assumption that all the activity covered by a die roll happens at the precise moment, in game time, that roll is called for. No big deal, right? But making that concept explicit could go a long way towards making a heist game work without spending hours on preparation.
For example: You’re using something like HeroQuest as a system. Your PC is a Parisian jewel thief. She’s confronted by a glass window with an electric alarm circuit. You make a Breaking and Entering roll, or whatever, and succeed. Your jewel thief slaps a suction cup on the window, pulls a glass cutter out of her pack, and cuts a smooth circle out of the glass. Does it say “glass cutter” and “suction cup” on your character sheet? No. Did you say “I bring my glass cutter and suction cup” to the GM before the heist started? No. That foresight is included in your successful roll. If you’d failed the roll, the GM could say, “the glass shatters.” Or, “you pat down your pockets—damn, if only you’d brought a glass cutter!” Or, “you start to cut the glass, then realize it’s covered with a grid of tiny alarm wires to foil glass cutters.”
This is pretty standard fortune-in-the-middle resolution. But once you get the hang of it, there’s a lot it can do: Your PC is handcuffed to a chair. You roll successfully on your Escape Artist skill. She regurgitates the lockpick she swallowed eight hours ago. OR: Your PC is sneaking down a museum corridor, towards the security guard. You roll successfully using her Meticulous Preparation skill. Your patient casing of the joint paid off—every evening at exactly this time the guard leaves his post for ten minutes to chat up the docent in the next gallery. OR: You roll successfully using her Charm and Carouse skills. Flashback to last night when you plied the guard with drinks, ensuring he’d be hungover and bleary the following day. Point is, once we break the assumption that everything covered by this roll is happening “now,” we can do a lot of crazy things with a pretty straightforward system.
There’s potential for abuse here, but so there is in any system. A successful skill roll should include only enough retconning to accomplish the stakes for that roll using that skill. The roll you made to get the guard hung over so you could sneak through his gallery does not mean you won’t have to do something different when you sneak back on the way out. And the GM should apply penalties on skills that don’t really apply to the situation at hand, or veto shit altogether when called for. They don’t have to let you use your Poetry skill to get past the motion detectors—unless that’s appropriate for the game you’re playing.
Suggested setting for this system? I was thinking Alan Furst meets Rififi meets To Catch A Thief. (And if those three references don’t mean anything to you, do yourself a favor and Google them up.) The PCs are the most cunning jewel thieves and con artists in Paris. The problem is, it’s 1941. And the German occupation puts a bit of a damper on their business. The French resistance wants to put them to work, the Gestapo wants to kill them, the NKVD would be quite happy to do both. So this is not a jaunty Ocean’s Eleven romp. It’s dark and forboding and suspenseful. The crooked honor of the gentleman thief confronts the grim expediency of the secret agent. Failure, betrayal, and death are waiting at every turn. So too are those deadly attacks of conscience, wherein jaded old criminals decide to fight for something larger than themselves, which always seem to come at the worst possible time.
Next time: Less old school, more indie game stylings with the aforementioned woo woo hey hey. Mad Russians. Hot ret-conning action. And fabulous, fabulous shoes!
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-21 08:39 pm (UTC)We had decided to go with a more standard heist for the trial run, but you could definitely use Caper! for Bothans Eleven. And at some point I'll probably do that, either with actual Bothans or with the stealing of the original DS plans. Just because that stuff is too tasty for me to resist.
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Date: 2006-04-21 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-21 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-22 05:08 pm (UTC)And we're still playing the waiting game, but the More Important Thing could be any day now...
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Date: 2006-04-21 09:53 pm (UTC)That way, neither the GM nor the players come into the game with full information -- you surprise the GM with the players' brilliant planning, and you surprise the players with the diabolical traps, and no one knows fully what will happen. It's big fun.
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Date: 2006-04-22 05:06 pm (UTC)